Luca Turin – författare

'Meet Luca Turin, a renegade scientist and perfume critic with an extraordinary sense of smell.' NewsdayFunny, irreverent and passionate, The Secret of Scent opens the lid on two worlds - the glamorous and highly lucrative realm of the perfume makers, and the equally rivalrous domain of smell science.Smell is our forgotten sense. Long neglected by science in favour of more prestigious areas of research, it's also barely understood in general life. At the core of our sense of smell lies an enigma: why do things smell the way they do? How is smell written into the molecules? This book is the story of the quest to solve this puzzle. Luca Turin has been described in The Economist as 'a man with a powerful nose and a bizarre obsession with perfume.' Starting with a tour of the great perfumes and their gifted makers, he shows how few people have an idea of what perfume is or how it is made, let alone how smell works and what part it plays in other pleasures like food. But not everyone has ignored this powerful sense. A small band of mavericks has been trying to crack the code of smell for seventy years. Building on their work, Turin thinks he has succeeded. And like all good mysteries, the solution was all the while hidden in plain sight - in this case, right under our noses.

The quintessential guide to the one hundred most glorious perfumes in the world.

When Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez published Perfumes: The Guide in 2008, it was hailed as "ravishingly entertaining" by John Lanchester in The New Yorker, "witty and knowledgeable" on Style.com, and "provocative and hugely entertaining" by the Times Literary Supplement. The Little Book of Perfumes focuses on just one hundred masterpieces of perfume: ninety-six five-star perfumes from the original book, as well as four "museum" perfumes-legendary scents that are preserved in the Versailles Osmothèque.

This stunningly produced petite volume offers lovers of perfume the best of the best-a perfect gift book for anyone looking either for a brilliant fragrance or an intelligent, witty read.

The first book of its kind: a definitive guide to the world of perfume Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez are experts in the world of scent. Turin, a renowned scientist, and Sanchez, a longtime perfume critic, have spent years sniffing the world’s most elegant and beautiful—as well as some truly terrible—perfumes. In Perfumes: The Guide, they combine their talents and experience to review more than twelve hundred fragrances, separating the divine from the good from the monumentally awful. Through witty, irreverent, and illuminating prose, the reviews in Perfumes not only provide consumers with an essential guide to shopping for fragrance, but also make for a unique reading experience. Perfumes features introductions to women’s and men’s fragrances and an informative “frequently asked questions” section including: • What is the difference between eau de toilette and perfume? • How long can I keep perfume before it goes bad? • What’s better: splash bottles or spray atomizers? • What are perfumes made of? • Should I change my fragrance each season? Perfumes: The Guide is an authoritative, one-of-a-kind book that will do for fragrance what Robert Parker’s books have done for wine. Beautifully designed and elegantly illustrated, this book will be the perfect gift for collectors and anyone who’s ever had an interest in the fascinating subject of perfume.Read Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez''s posts on the Penguin Blog.

'I've long wished perfumery to be taken seriously as an art, and for scent critics to be as fierce as opera critics, and for the wearers of certain "fragrances" to be hissed in public, while others are cheered. This year has brought Perfumes: The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, which I breathed in, rather than read, in one delighted gulp.' Hilary Mantel, GuardianPerfumes: The Guide is the culmination of Turin's lifelong obsession and rare scientific flair and Sanchez's stylish and devoted blogging about every scent that she's ever loved and loathed. Together they make a fine and utterly persuasive argument for the unrecognised craft of perfume-making. Perfume writing has certainly never been this honest, compelling or downright entertaining.

''I''ve long wished perfumery to be taken seriously as an art, and for scent critics to be as fierce as opera critics, and for the wearers of certain "fragrances" to be hissed in public, while others are cheered. This year has brought Perfumes: The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, which I breathed in, rather than read, in one delighted gulp.'' Hilary Mantel, GuardianPerfumes: The Guide is the culmination of Turin''s lifelong obsession and rare scientific flair and Sanchez''s stylish and devoted blogging about every scent that she''s ever loved and loathed. Together they make a fine and utterly persuasive argument for the unrecognised craft of perfume-making. Perfume writing has certainly never been this honest, compelling or downright entertaining.

In Perfumes, Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez reviewed nearly 1,500 fragrances in their witty, irreverent and innovative handbook - separating the divine from the good from the monumentally awful. Here in The Little Book of Perfumes the authors choose their 100 greatest fragrances of all time. Some are very famous, some hardly known, for women and men. There is Jicky (1889), unisex coeval of the Eiffel Tower and ''a towering masterpiece''; Chanel''s No. 5 (1921), perhaps the world''s most famous perfume, ''stretching deliciously like a sleepy panther''; Knize Ten which ''everyone should own because there is only one like it'' and White Linen (1978), ''a canonical expression of the American ideal of sex appeal''. This is a perfect gift, a perfect browse.

Warum öffnet sich der Himmel über uns, wenn wir unser Lieblingsparfum auflegen? Was hat Glockengeläut am Ostermorgen mit einer Kreation von Estée Lauder zu tun? Und weshalb können wir manche Leute einfach nicht riechen?Das kleine Buch der großen Parfums präsentiert einhundert legendäre Klassiker und ist eine fundierte Einführung in die Welt der Parfümerie. Von Angel bis Vol de Nuit, vom scheuen Blumenduft über das männliche Urparfum bis hin zu den großen Düften der Geschichte, die im Versailler Parfummuseum lagern: Alles ist so sinnlich-nuanciert beschrieben, dass die Lektüre zum Erlebnis wird. Nach der Lektüre gibt es nur eins: auf zur nächsten Parfümerie!